After the fairly uneventful release of Chrome 28, version 29 moves into beta and has some ground-breaking features for Android.

Support for WebRTC, which is the direct peer-to-peer protocol and is part of the HTML standard opens up the ability for mobile video chats in the browser. When you couple this with the Web Audio API, which is now included in the Android beta the prospect of in-browser video conferencing becomes a distinct possibility.

For developers the WebAudio API, which is already implemented on the desktop and iOs and currently in beta 29 is currently restricted to Android devices with ARM processors with the NEON extension, means that they can implement "professional-quality" sound in games. This MIDI Synth demo lets you try it out:

(Click on image to open demo in new window)

For desktop users support for the VP8 codec used in the WebM format means that the same quality of video can be delivered at half the bit rate. All we need now is a wide spread support for VP8 or any single workable codec.

A major enhancement for desktop users is an improvement to the Omnibox, which now tailors search results based on the recency of websites visited to provide users with suggestions that are "contextually relevant at the right time.”

Among the new features that are currently more experimental is a draggable menu that provides the ability to access menu functions in one motion, this only works on devices with virtual menu buttons. If you have a physical menu button you won't see this feature as Chrome hides the on-screen menu button.

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